Her jealous bitterness was enhanced twofold because her poor husband was gone, and the memory of his ambition for his son stung her to sharper effort.

Often the imagined disappointments of the dead, when they are still loved and unforgotten, weigh more heavily upon the living than their own.

"I dun'no' what your father would have said if he'd thought Jerome had got to leave school so young," she told Elmira; and her lost husband's grievance in the matter was nearer her heart than her own.
Jerome's plan for evening lessons did not work long.

The school-master to whom he applied professed his entire readiness, even enthusiasm, to further such a laudable pursuit of knowledge under difficulties; but he was young himself, scarcely out of college, and the pretty girls in his school swayed his impressionable nature into many side issues, even when his mind was set upon the main track.
Soon Jerome found himself of an evening in the midst of a class of tittering girls, who also had been fired with zeal for improvement and classical learning, who conjugated _amo_ with foolish blushes and glances of sugared sweetness at himself and the teacher.

Then he left.
Jerome at that time felt absolutely no need of the feminine element in creation, holding himself aloof from it with a patient, because measureless, superiority.